Lucid stood up from the chair.
Not slowly. Not with any particular announcement. He stood up, pushed the chair back with his leg, and said what he had to say in a tone that did not invite a response.
Karmen's expression moved through three things in quick succession. Surprise was not one of them. Irritation was the first, a sharp crease between his brows that he did not bother managing. Then something that sat closer to calculation, quiet and internal. Then a sound from the back of his throat, somewhere between a grunt and a grumble, the sound of someone who has already run the argument and knows where it ends but objects to arriving there.
He did not say anything that amounted to a real counter. He just sat there with his hands on the table and watched Lucid cross to the door, and the watching had something in it that was not quite respect and not quite its opposite either.
Lucid opened the door and walked out.
The corridor outside the side room was cooler than the room itself. The manor smelled of timber and something faintly metallic that came from the heating fixtures built into the walls, older ones, the kind that ran warm but not hot and left a faint mineral trace in the air after long use.
Gerald was in the corridor. He had been there long enough that he was standing comfortably rather than as someone who had just arrived.
"That went well," Gerald said.
"Go away."
"Statistically, interactions of that type tend to last longer. You were brief. I consider brevity a virtue in most circumstances, though I acknowledge that in this particular case it may have been more flight than principle."
Lucid kept walking.
"You left the tea," Gerald said, from behind him. "Untouched. Or nearly untouched. It was cold by the time you would have drunk any of it, but the gesture of leaving it entirely is notable."
Lucid reached the end of the corridor where it opened into the manor's entrance hall. The main door was ahead. He moved toward it.
Then he stopped.
The window to his left faced the front of the manor. The courtyard, the road, the trees that had been planted too recently to give shade. Through the glass, in the space between two of those trees, there was a woman.
Dark dress. A veil that covered most of her face but not the mouth. She held a fan in one hand, closed, and the other hand was at her side. Her lips were dark, almost black, and they were arranged in a smile that had nothing comfortable in it. She was looking directly at the window. Directly at him.
He blinked.
She was gone.
The space between the two trees was empty. The road beyond it was empty. The courtyard was the same quiet stone it had been all morning.
'She is gone,' Alice said, inside him. Her voice was quieter than usual, the formality present but not forward. 'She is not there anymore. She is not anywhere anymore.'
'Who was she,' Lucid thought.
'Someone the rift held onto,' Alice said. 'That is all. The Omega rift kept records. She was one of them.'
Lucid stood at the window for a moment longer. He was thinking about Ivy, about the way she had shed the human form she had been wearing and become something else entirely, something that the rift itself had constructed around her, the conduit made flesh. He had fought things above Lyssandra's tier before, but none of them had felt like that. Ivy had felt like the architecture of a rift given a face, and he had stood in front of that and done what needed doing, but the impression of it had not fully left.
He thought about the delta rift. The first one. The imperial army moving against the settlers with their makeshift weapons, and the spider that had come out of the forest, and the decision he had made to light the fire and let it wake up and charge. He had fought that spider in the real world first, smaller, an offspring of the thing he encountered inside. He had pieced that together afterward. The rift had been running a version of the past, and the spider he had faced outside was the spawn of the one inside, and knowing that had settled something in him without resolving it.
Delta rifts did that. Omega rifts did that. Zeta rifts did something adjacent, though with less fidelity. They ran pasts. Not fabrications. Actual accumulated weight from people who had moved through them. Ivy had been important to Karmen in ways that had not been explained fully and that Lucid had not asked about. What he knew was that she had been real enough to fight, and that when she had stopped being Ivy and become the conduit, whatever she had become was not a tier he had a clean name for.
He had nothing on her. That was the accurate assessment. Whatever she had been at that moment, whatever she had been drawing from, he had won because of Alice and not because of himself, and he had known that while it was happening.
He straightened.
'You are standing at a window in a corridor,' Alice said. 'Gerald is watching you.'
'I know.'
'He has been watching you for approximately two minutes.'
Lucid turned from the window and continued toward the door.
"Are you done out there, brat?"
Jane's voice came from the top of the manor steps as he pushed through the main door. She was leaning against the stone pillar at the top, arms crossed, her expression carrying the specific impatience of someone who had been waiting longer than they agreed to.
Gerald came through the door behind him. "I would agree that considerable noise was made in there. I was not close enough to hear the specifics but the tone was legible through the wall. What transpired?"
Lucid looked at both of them and said nothing. He moved past Jane down the steps. She straightened from the pillar and watched him go with an expression that shifted from impatience to something less certain.
He was not going to explain anything to people who had spent the entire duration of his meeting inside that room reporting to the man he had been meeting with. He was aware that Jane and Gerald both served purposes that extended beyond escorting him through the manor district, and he had been aware of it since Gerald appeared in the corridor after the conversation, positioned perfectly, and he was not in the mood to pretend otherwise.
"Wait," Jane said.
He kept walking.
"Lucid." Gerald's voice had dropped the performative register. "Please."
That made him stop more than anything else would have. Gerald without the affectation was a different signal than Gerald with it.
He did not turn around. He stood on the manor road between two of the young trees with his back to both of them.
It struck him then. Fully. The manor behind him had been the origin point of most of what had followed. The first conversation with Karmen. The mission parameters. The pendant. The course set by someone else before he had ever had the option to choose it himself. All of it traced back to this building, this road, this territory.
He had stood in omega rifts and delta rifts and fought things that had no clean classification. He had gone through the red mountains and the void and the south of Vex and a domain that had bled into the surrounding reality. And all of it had started here. In a manor that smelled of mineral heat and old timber and had a window that, if you stood at the right angle, let you see the lower market and the pastry stall that had been using the same oil for twenty-three years.
He stood there for a moment and let that settle.
Then he turned around.
Jane and Gerald were both at the top of the steps. Gerald had his hands at his sides. Jane was chewing on something she was probably not supposed to be chewing in front of guests.
"You have three minutes," Lucid said. "Say what you need to say."
Jane swallowed whatever it was. "Five."
"Four," Gerald said.
Lucid waited.